Let mathematicians do the AI-supported research on their own incentive at their own pace? What leaves a bad taste is that OpenAI doesn’t do this because they care about the actual math. Especially when they are leaving the necessary work of properly verifying, understanding, and writing up in an intelligible manner the proofs, up to the math community.

People would be more sympathetic if this was an alien race sharing their math results in not-quite-intelligible-to-us papers, because there at least we could assume that the aliens cared about the math and did their best to transmit their understanding to us.

▲ schiffern 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

  >Let mathematicians do the AI-supported research on their own incentive at their own pace?

After they release a model, it only takes a handful of scrappy young math grads (incentivized to publish high-impact papers) to independently put in those exact same prompts, and more. The tsunami remains.

How is it worse if OpenAI hires those same grads internally (vs independently) to run the same prompts?

  > leaving the necessary work... up to the math community

So now it's better if OpenAI hires the mathematicians internally (vs independently) to verify any results before release. I wish people would make up their mind!

Again, that's what the math community told OpenAI they don't want. They said do release any internal results early, rather than withhold them.

Or are you saying.... OpenAI should never run an internal test involving math proofs, for fear of this 'tsunami' of potential discoveries they'd be forced to release? Isn't that a bit like the scholars refusing to look through Galileo's telescope? :-/

	▲	nxpnsv 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Except they don't too the full work. If the prompt also verified that what was proven is what what asked for, and that the proof is correct, and then write it up in an understandable fashion, then the work is done. As it is now it is more like a spoiler for a movie than the actual movie.

▲ ncruces 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

For OpenAI/Anthropic/etc it's apparently not enough to be the tool that helped a mathematician with a discovery/proof/etc.

They need to state it was entirely autonomous.

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Robotbeat 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I don’t blame OpenAI for that. There’s a ton of weirdly politically motivated denial of AI being useful for solving problems that require new answers. This is one of the very few possible ways to objectively prove that AI can do that.

	▲	pfdietz 22 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		What's more, it's quite possibly one of the best ways to improve AI, as math provides both a large corpus of training data and an objective way to measure capability. IMO this is likely why the AI companies are working on this, with improvement in math reasoning bleeding over into improvement in general reasoning. Really, mathematicians should be thrilled about this, as this could be the biggest practical payoff of thousands of years of investment in math, bigger even than all the preceding science and engineering payoffs. We're told one of the benefits of a math education is learning how to think; was it really so unpredictable if that also applied to machines? This sort of payoff would justify wide open checkbooks for more math research, even by humans.

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famouswaffles 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Well yeah, their ultimate goal is to develop "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work"